Why Your Commute Sucks

I always thought it would be nerve-gas or a nuclear bomb that brought down the city of New York. But perhaps the worst threat is internal: The thread that holds this city together will simply unravel, rip and give way under the strain of neglect.

There were glaring signs of the coming collapse in June. Reports of passengers jumping out of stranded subway trains and making it to stations on foot. The words “I will survive” scrawled in the fog of human body heat coagulating on the windows of a packed, air-conditioner-less F train dead on the tracks. An A train smoking off the rails with 800 riders on board.

We hardened New Yorkers can handle swastika-scrawling graffiti artists, dadaists hawking live crickets, break-dancers swinging their sneakers within inches of our skulls, doomsday preachers hollering at the top of their lungs. We can coexist remarkably well with all manner of odorous bodily discharge and vermin that crawl and ooze about our feet under the jaundice-lamps beneath the earth. We’ve learned to bear the cross that is our daily commute with a sigh, to gaze vacantly into infinity until it’s over. Delays, now and then — not a problem. But more and more, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is failing to accomplish its basic mission: To take New Yorkers from point A to point B safely and faster than a horse-drawn omnibus.

Why do our commutes suck? Our 113-year-old subway system has been underfunded for decades. It moves 5.6 million passengers per day using technology that dates back to before World War II. Rather than modernizing, the MTA is accumulating debt and spending billions of dollars on superficial alterations, quick fixes and projects that provide photo opportunities to politicians but do little to address its systemic weaknesses. While the number of delays each month has climbed to 70,000 — up from 28,000 five years ago — one out of every five dollars the MTA spends from its operating budget goes to servicing debt on capital bonds.

It’s anyone’s guess what the governor hates more: funding the MTA or taking responsibility for it.

A lack of accountability and long-term planning has plagued the MTA since its founding. This has meant that spending all too often follows the whims of constituencies that have the most clout beyond the ballot — real-estate developers, big construction firms, construction unions and the finance companies that underwrite the MTA’s bonds and profit handsomely.

In May, the authority released a six-point plan to improve service. Don’t get your hopes up.

“Who’s in Charge?”

The plan allocates $20 million on top of the current capital budget for improvements like new subway cars, increased inspections, new track and more emergency responders to treat sick passengers. But signifying its real priorities, the MTA issued $1.6 billion in bonds that same month, adding $5 billion more to its already bloated $38 billion debt load. Instead of improving service, the money raised will go towards blockbuster expenditures like extending the Second Avenue subway and polishing our transit turd by beautifying stations — all priorities of Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

While Mayor Bill de Blasio gets a lot of flack from New Yorkers over the subway’s deteriorated state, most riders do not understand that it is actually the governor’s office that has the most sway over the MTA. Their confusion is understandable.

STUFFED: New Yorkers are getting close to each other on their commutes these days. Real close. Credit: Scott Lynch.

“Who’s in charge?” Cuomo asked on June 22. “Who knows! Maybe the county executive, maybe the president, maybe the governor, maybe the mayor.”

Cuomo was hyping his last-minute proposal to have the state legislature grant him a controlling stake on the MTA’s board. But the governor already appoints six of the board’s 14 members, including its chair. Together with members from the counties surrounding the city — mostly plucked from local chambers of commerce and corporate-law firms — Cuomo has a working majority on the board. He has the strongest grip on the authority’s purse strings as well. It was his brilliant idea to cut $65 million from the MTA’s budget this year, for instance.

The fact that Cuomo did not submit the bill to give him control of the MTA until the end of the legislative session indicates that his proposal wasn’t serious. He also called on Mayor de Blasio and the city to match state contributions to the authority. Currently, the state chips in about $32 billion and the city $8 billion towards the MTA’s five-year capital plan. If he had actually received what he supposedly wished for, that too would have been a win for Cuomo. Upstate lawmakers are loath to meet the MTA’s budgetary needs. Cuomo’s bill would have meant the city contributing more than twice as much to the MTA as it does now while possessing even less control over it.

“The MTA is a state-run agency and the ultimate executive of that is Gov. Cuomo,” says Masha Burina of the Riders Alliance, a 1,000-member straphanger advocacy group. “The state has been steadily removing funds from the transit authority. It’s indicative of a reluctance to invest in this public good.”

The Collapse

A citizen lobbying effort the Riders Alliance initiated was instrumental in halting the governor’s yearly habit of removing funds from the MTA’s operating budget and putting the money towards its general debt-service fund. Cuomo removed $270 million from the MTA’s operating budget in his first term, between the 2011 and 2015 fiscal years. The money went to servicing debt that the MTA was forced to accumulate because of a lack of state funding.

Meanwhile, the MTA has squandered the funds that haven’t been raided, spending lavishly on multibillion-dollar ventures dear to the governor’s heart like the new subway for the Upper East Side, accumulating more debt in the process.

“Real estate is the only reason that the Second Avenue extension was built,” says Tom Angotti, professor emeritus of urban planning at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. “It was supported by a political base which is largely real-estate interests on the Upper East Side, the most expensive real estate in New York City and perhaps in the world. Adding that stub of a subway line jacks up land values, property values, rents and potential profits. Development opportunities become more abundant in the area.”

The cost of the Second Avenue subway at this point — three new stops near Millionaire’s Row and refurbishing of the station at Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street? $4.45 billion.

The extension of the 7 line to Hudson Yards is another money pit the MTA has dug its gilded shovel into. “That was an expensive stub essentially for billionaires and millionaires and very well-paid people, financed through a public-private partnership,” says Angotti.

Cuomo gets a pass on that boondoggle. It was the brainchild of our billionaire former mayor, Michael Bloomberg. Under his administration, the city’s Economic Development Corporation issued the bonds that paid for the $2.37 billion extension, just one station at 34th Street and 11th Avenue.

“We have taken on projects that have been expensive,” MTA board member James Vitiello lamented at the board’s monthly meeting in June. “I think we’re coming around to seeing we may have done some of that at the expense of day-to-day maintenance. We’re adding new rooms to a house that had a roof falling in and water in the basement.”

Some observers, however, contend there is a false equivalency in this analogy.

“Why should we have to choose between the continued improvement of what we already have and additions to a system that hasn’t seen a lot of additions really since the 1940s?” asks subway historian Clifton Hood, defending the capital expenditures. “I think that’s absolutely false thinking that buys into this ideology that we have to choose one or the other. There’s a lot of waterfront development happening now.”

But “waterfront redevelopment” is often code for upscaling undervalued real estate and longtime dockside residents are fighting plans for luxury high-rises from the Bronx to Sunset Park. Opponents of the recent subway expansions aren’t against extending the system. They just want it to extend to meet real needs.

“We need a bigger vision for how the transportation system is going to be expanded throughout the city, but also expanded in terms of its capacity,” says Masha Burina. “That means buying new train cars, laying down new tracks. We need to actually invest in purchasing these capital goods.”

Most importantly, the subway needs a new signaling system. Its current assemblage of mechanical levers, glass-encased switches and cloth-clad wiring is prone to breakdowns. Even when they’re functioning, the signals slow down service by forcing the MTA to maintain a safe distance between trains. Since it’s impossible to determine precisely where trains are at any given time, transit workers log their locations with pen and paper. The MTA’s program to update the signals is on a pace to be completed in 50 years. Only the signals on the L line have been entirely upgraded since it began, and the L will be shutting down between Brooklyn and Manhattan in April 2019 for 15 months of repairs.

The Edifice Complex:

Imagine you’re a politician presiding over a crumbling subway system. You have two choices. You can put your nose to the grindstone and make sure the needed resources are made available to keep the existing system in good repair and have it modernized as quickly as possible. Or, you can ignore the boring stuff you won’t get credit for anyway and throw billions of dollars at exciting new mega-projects that will make your well-heeled buddies in finance, real estate and construction happy while creating exciting new photo opportunities for you to partake in. Which would you choose?

In New York, the choice is always the same and the governor and the MTA aren’t the only culprits. The merits of these various mega-projects vary, but some things they have in common is they cost a fortune and almost always come in years late and wildly over budget. Here’s a look at a few of them.

2nd Avenue Subway

The long-dormant Second Avenue subway project was revived in 2007 and became operational at the beginning of 2017. For $4.45 billion, the Q train was extended by two miles from 63rd to 96th Street and created a windfall for Upper East Side real estate interests.

Not content to rest on its very expensive laurels, the MTA is moving forward with plans for the second phase of Second Avenue subway construction, which will extend the line by another 1.7 miles from 96th to 125th Street by 2029. The current price tag: $6 billion. At roughly $3.5 billion per mile, this will surpass the costs of the just-completed first phase and will set a new world record for subway construction costs, according to Alon Levy of the Pedestrian Observations blog. He concludes, “At $6 billion this line shouldn’t be built.”

East End Access

This MTA mega-project will provide a direct connection to the Second Avenue subway andGrand Central Station for Long Island Railroad (LIRR) passengers who currently use Penn Station. Begun in the waning days of the Clinton administration, the East End Access project was supposed to be finished by 2009 at a cost of $4.3 billion. After years of setbacks, it is now projected to be finished in 2023 at a cost of more than $10 billion and will serve even fewer people per day than the three stations that comprise the Second Avenue subway. One driver in the cost overruns has been MTA’s decision to build a whole new set of tracks and platforms for LIRR trains beneath Grand Central’s existing 44 platforms and 67 tracks, which are currently used by Metro-North. According to Business Insider, the final cost of building these new tracks rather than sharing the existing ones is expected to be close to $2 billion.

7th Avenue Extension

Located on the far west side of Manhattan, Hudson Yards is New York’s newest neighborhood and the embodiment of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s neoliberal vision of New York as a “luxury city.” When construction is complete, the site will have more than 18 million square feet of commercial and residential space, state-of-the-art office towers, more than 100 shops,approximately 4,000 residences and a luxury hotel with more than 200 rooms. But none of this would be possible without access to mass transit.

Unable to garner financial support from the MTA — because it answers to the governor, not the mayor — Bloomberg had the city pay the full $2.37 billion to extend the 7 train from Times Square to Hudson Yards. As originally promoted, the 7 train extension would go from Times Square to 42nd Street and 10th Avenue in the heart of the Off-Broadway theater district and then down to its final destination at 33rd Street and 11th Avenue. But as the cost overruns piled up, the promise of a theater district stop was shelved and the extension became a one-station affair, which was finally completed in 2015.

World Trade Center Transportation Hub

In the aftermath of 9/11, New York’s leaders wanted the reconstruction of the World Trade Center’s transit hub to become a civic icon. Famed Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava’s exotic design for the station was supposed to embody the wings of a bird taking flight. As the cost of fulfilling this vision spiraled upward, the bird transformed into a white elephant. When the new transit hub was completed in 2016, the final cost was nearly $4 billion, making it the world’s most expensive train station. The site was built and developed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is jointly controlled by the governors of the two states.

Brooklyn-Queens Connector (BQX)

Not to be outdone by his rival in Albany, Mayor Bill de Blasio jumped into the mega-project sweepstakes last year with a proposal for a $2.5 billion streetcar line that would travel from Astoria, Queens, to Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Critics have dubbed it the “gentrification express” whose real purpose is to inflate waterfront real estate values. The project would allegedly pay for itself with a $2.75 fare, but a leaked memo from de Blasio’s BQX advisors suggested the actual price tag could be much higher. And, because of its proximity to the East River, much of the line would be vulnerable to flooding in the event of another storm like Hurricane Sandy.

— John Tarleton

“There’s room for us to begin enacting a multitude of solutions to the city’s transit woes,” says Burina. “That would include improving the system as it is so that trains are more reliable so that the number of delays decreases and crowding on platforms and inside the subway cars is addressed. But, at the same time, we should be thinking about where we are headed as a city when it comes to our growth and development, and really consider what does it mean to have an inclusive transit system that can address [the needs of] and be accessible to New Yorkers everywhere.”

Luxury City

That’s a nice thought, but putting it into reality would first require Cuomo to gird his loins and take responsibility for the MTA. In late June, the governor, who is up for re-election next year, declared a “state of emergency” and directed the authority to draft a plan to address the mounting delays within 30 days. (In the spring, he’d offered $1 million in genius grants to anyone who could provide a plausible quick fix.) Joseph Lhota, Cuomo’s newly appointed MTA chair, will be the man holding the mop. Lhota won accolades during his previous tenure as chair for steering the authority through Superstorm Sandy, but he left the post after less than a year to run for mayor in 2013 as a Republican.

“Joe Lhota is a respected professional who has valuable experience as MTA chair,” Riders Alliance executive director John Raskin said in a statement. “The question remains, what is the governor’s plan to fix the subway, and will he give Chairman Lhota the funding he needs to get the job done?”

PITS OF DESPAIR: While many New Yorkers wait for trains that won’t arrive, billions have been spent on a few lavish stations.Credit: Scott Lynch.

City officials, particularly Mayor de Blasio, bear some responsibility for the subway clusterfuck too. The city, for instance, could free up more traffic lanes for express buses, which would ease the burden on the subway system. Instead, de Blasio, like Bloomberg, has his eyes on costly waterfront development. His administration has approved tax breaks exceeding half a billion dollars for high-rise developers surrounding the Hudson Yards site — but the mayor’s personal pet transportation project is the BQX, a $2.5 billion trolley system that would run along the waterfront and connect Astoria to Sunset Park. The project would allegedly pay for itself with a $2.75 fare, but a leaked memo from de Blasio’s BQX advisors suggested the actual price tag could be much higher. Construction costs alone, the memo projected, will rise by $100 million a year due to inflation.

The trolley won’t “serve the transportation needs of the vast majority of people living in Brooklyn and Queens,” says Angotti, co-author of Zoned Out! Race, Displacement and City Planning in New York City. “Again, it’s planning transportation around real-estate speculation.”

Angotti also takes issue with the city’s habit of allowing luxury high-rises to be built on top of major transit hubs. Nearly one in three of the city’s most expensive apartments sit empty for at least 10 months out of the year. Why is the city squandering its housing stock by providing easy public transit access for rich ghosts who prefer to be elsewhere?

“We have to stop believing in the myth that there is this invisible population of people with a lot of money who are coming to New York City and the city is obligated to provide them housing, transportation and services,” says Angotti. “That was the Bloomberg Luxury City myth. The biggest vacancy rates in New York City are in luxury housing. They’re not being built to meet people’s transportation needs. They’re being built as vertical safe-deposit boxes.”

Reclaiming Our Subway

For a brief period, beginning in 1940, the subways were actually operated by the city.

“I’ve gone through those records, and you can see City Councilmen got letters from constituents complaining that the buses now stopped every four blocks instead of every two blocks,” said Clifton Hood. “That’s a legitimate thing to complain about because if you’re 80 years old or if you’re a mother with two kids in a stroller, walking four blocks instead of two blocks is a real handicap. Their feet were really put to the fire, and that doesn’t exist anymore.”

From its earliest inception as the New York City Transit Authority in 1953 — it was put under the MTA umbrella in the 1960s — the authority structure was established “to insulate politicians from accountability for what is an extremely expensive system,” says Hood. “What you could say is the problem with the subways in New York City is that they are extremely expensive, there is a lot of public demand for good service and cheap service, and yet there is not the wherewithal to provide the funds from anybody for that service.”

Underground History:

The subway transformed New York City and has become an indispensible part of daily life over the past century. However, for much of that time the public has had little say in how the system is run and on whose behalf.

1900–1904

Fifty-four mostly immigrant workers are killed during the construction of the city’s first underground subway line which runs from City Hall to West 145th Street via Grand Central Station and Times Square.

October 1904

With a trainload of dignitaries on board, NYC Mayor George McClellan drives the subway at top speeds of 40 mph on its maiden voyage from City Hall to W. 145th St. Fast, clean and modern, the new subway is wildly popular with a public accustomed to often slow and cumbersome travel above ground. The subway is operated by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), a private and monopolistic entity founded by the financier August Belmont.

1913

A second massive wave of subway construction is initiated by the city. The IRT will come to operate what are now the 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 trains while another private company, the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT), will oversee what is today the J-L-M-N-Q-R-W-Z trains.

1925

With public anger growing at the greed of the IRT and BMT monopolies, construction begins on a third subway system, the city-owned and operated IND, or Independent Subway System, which will become what are today the A-B-C-D-E-F-G trains.

1932

The first branch of the Eighth Avenue subway opens and a burst of subway construction on the IND continues through the decade. This activity is spurred on by generous federal funding provided through the New Deal.

1940

The city buys out the IRT and BMT and unifies the subway system under its control. Construction of new subway lines largely comes to a halt. After World War II, transportation funding for New York will be largely directed toward highway construction instead of supporting mass transit.

1948

The nickel fare — instituted in 1904 — is rescinded and the cost of a subway ride doubles to 10 cents, sparking public outrage.

1953

With the subways’ finances faltering as automobile usage increases, the state government places the system under the control of the New York City Transit Authority, which is designed to be immune from public pressure.

1968

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is born as Gov. Nelson Rockefeller folds the NYC Transit Authority into a new regional transportation behemoth that includes the LIRR, Metro North and the bridge and tunnel empire previously under the control of Robert Moses.

1980s

With an infusion of fresh government support, the subway system’s decades-long decline is reversed as every mile of main line track is rebuilt and a new fleet of cars introduced.

1994

Republicans seize control of Congress and the governor’s mansion in Albany and slash federal and state funding for MTA capital projects. The MTA makes up the difference by issuing billions of dollars in bonds. The bonds are to be repaid by raiding the farebox that finances the day-to-day operating budget, a practice that continues to this day. Regular fare hikes become the norm.

2011

Newly elected Governor Andrew Cuomo takes office and initiates a yearly practice of raiding MTA funds to pay for other budget items. Essential maintenance is deferred and efforts to install a modern signal system precede at a snail’s pace.

2012–2017

Monthly service delays more than double as decades of deferred maintenance take its toll. With the much ballyhooed Second Avenue subway line set to go into service on January 1, 2017, Gov. Cuomo attends a New Year’s Eve celebration at the new 72nd Street station and then boards the Q train for an inaugural ride. “This is New York,” Cuomo tells gathered reporters, “and there is nothing we can’t do when we put our mind to it.”

— Indypendent Staff

Public transit — like health care, public housing, higher education, public broadcasting, and the Post Office — was once thought of as a costly but necessary service for the general good. Now it is looked upon as a burden to taxpayers, expected to be sustainable on its own, though it lacks the capability to do so. Nobody in Washington, Albany or City Hall wants to fund the MTA or be accountable for its mounting shortcomings. In the absence of any significant voter pressure, our political system operates in default mode, retooling a public benefit to satisfy the whims of a wealthy minority.

Once upon a time, the interests of real-estate tycoons and other corporate elites went nearly hand in hand with those of the workaday straphanger. In order to support New York’s extraordinary commercial growth — fueled in the 19th century by the export of slave-picked cotton and maintained into the 20th Century by a continuous supply of hungry immigrants — the city’s housing stock had to expand. Land speculators were only happy to oblige, and employers needed a way to transport their growing workforce to downtown docks and factories.

“Where are the business foundations and major corporations based in New York City?” asks Hood. “Where are the major New York City corporate law firms, which, after all, have a lot of money and a lot of clout, with respect to what’s going on with the subway?”

Noisy complaints from business leaders helped rescue the MTA in the 1980s when, as novelist Paul Theroux described it, the subway had “the filthiest trains, the most bizarre graffiti, the noisiest wheels, the craziest passengers, the most macabre crimes,” and, one might add, the least dependable service in its existence. Hood blames Reaganism for the idea that “we should starve the public sector.”

Another lingering question: Where is the Transport Workers Union? Their working conditions are our riding conditions.

In an email to The Indypendent, TWU Local 100 spokesperson Jim Gannon blamed the subway trouble on a “confluence of factors” including the system’s advanced age and the need to conduct repairs overnight and clear out before the morning rush. The “MTA’s capital plan is good and totally necessary, but the result won’t be felt for some years to come,” he wrote. “We’ve been pressing for more money to be sunk into the operating budget which could then be used for maintenance of the current system. There’s no easy answer.”

On June 27, when secured pieces of rail, loosened by tunnel vibrations, fell on tracks and caused the derailment of a packed A train, Local 100 and the supervisors union blamed the MTA — but pointedly, not Gov. Cuomo. While transit workers guided rattled passengers to safety through the smoky dark beneath Harlem, Cuomo was in Albany horse-trading for the new $4 billion Tappan Zee Bridge to be named after his father, Mario. Meanwhile, a proposal by state Senator Michael Gianaris (D-Queens) to tax millionaires to fund the subway was left on the table. The money, to be raised from wealthy residents in the MTA’s service area and by upping the state’s hotel tax by $5, would have been devoted exclusively to the MTA’s maintenance and modernization needs.

Interestingly enough, in an era when Cuomo has fought for capping state workers’ salaries, Local 100 members received pay bumps in 2014 and again this year. The union endorsed Cuomo’s re-election bid after the contract settlement in 2014 and has stuck by his side since, despite the growing amount of shade cast in his direction.

“The governor is not shirking responsibility like some politicians. He’s out in the open, meeting this decades-old challenge head-on,” Local 100 President John Samuelsen said of Cuomo’s gambit to control the authority he already controls last month.

Gannon insists the union “invested a lot of resources into [its] contract campaigns” and credits Local 100’s “strongly united membership standing behind the leadership” for the raises. “Cuomo had nothing to do with the recent contract,” he said. “I’m sure the MTA had to clear the final document through him, but negotiations were strictly between us and the MTA.”

With businesses passing the buck and the transit workers’ union sitting in Cuomo’s lap, it looks as if the task of creating political pressure to address the crisis at the MTA will ultimately fall to the millions of riders suffering on the trains every day.

The way to win “meaningful improvements to the subway is to continue to beat the drum of accountability,” says the Riders Alliance’s Masha Burina. “And again, that means making sure that New Yorkers, every time that they go underground, they know that they are stepping not into just New York City territory, but they are stepping into Gov. Cuomo’s territory. He is the one who is ultimately accountable for fixing the subways. The only way we can win that is if there’s enough pressure on the governor to ensure that he knows that he has to satisfy the growing frustration among the ridership.”

How to Get the Subways We Deserve:

Take Care of the Basics

Showboating politicians who come around for splashy photo opps but who won’t take responsibility for the basic upkeep of our subways are useless. The system is 113 years old. It needs constant maintenance and repairs. The signal system is antiquated, which is a major factor in train delays. The MTA’s current plan is to modernize all the signals in 50 (!) years. That’s unacceptable.

Tax the Rich!

State Senator Michael Gianaris (D-Queens) has proposed an income tax surcharge on millionaires living within the 12 counties served by the MTA that would raise $2 billion per year. You can fix a lot of signals with that money and give straphangers a break on future fare hikes as well. And it is only fair, given that pricey projects such as the 2nd Avenue subway and the 7 train extension have spurred real estate values in what are already some of the poshest neighborhoods in the city.

Democratize the MTA

Both New York State and City are appointocracies. How much more you will have to pay to live in a rent-stabilized apartment, increases in tuition at CUNY and SUNY colleges and hikes in water rates, to give just a few examples, are determined by unelected, nominally independent boards that are appointed by the governor and/or the mayor. This insulates elected leaders from the blame for unpopular decisions their hand-picked appointees make. The MTA runs on the same principle and the results have not been pretty.

So why not have the MTA Board be directly elected by the people of the New York City area? Surely an elected board would be more responsive to the riding public than the current one. Would an elected board be prone to short-term thinking and an unwillingness to make tough decisions that ensure the long-term health of the system? Maybe. But that’s what we’ve had for decades. Let’s try something different.

In the meantime, the best vehicle for empowering commuters is the six-year-old Riders Alliance (ridersny.org). It recruits members at subway stations, bus stops and community meetings and turns them into transit activists who work to hold public officials accountable.

Community and Workers Unite

Since its founding in the 1930s, Transport Workers Union Local 100 has been one of the city’s most militant, left-leaning unions. In 2011, the 41,000-member local was the first union in New York City to throw its support behind Occupy Wall Street and the movement of the 99 percent. In 2014, Gov. Cuomo helped deliver a favorable contract settlement to TWU at a time when he was forcing other public sector unions to accept years of wage freezes. The union endorsed Cuomo’s re-election bid and has repaid the governor ever since with its fealty. No one can blame TWU’s leaders for seeking to deliver for members whose hard work is essential to the functioning of the city. But the union’s relationship with the governor does come at the cost of lost opportunities for a powerful alliance between transit workers and straphangers. As for Cuomo, he has gone after other public sector workers with a vengeance in the past. If he should throw the transit workers under the bus in the future to shift blame from himself, where will they be?

Two Terms Is Enough

When Gov. Cuomo was up for re-election in 2014, he received an unexpectedly spirited challenge in the Democratic primary from progressive law professor Zephyr Teachout. She won half the counties in the state and over a third of the total vote. However, Cuomo swamped her in New York City and the surrounding suburban counties assured his victory. For their loyalty to Cuomo, NYCers have been repaid with the back of his hand. If Cuomo gets another strong primary challenge, let’s be the wiser for it. Otherwise, getting him to pay attention to the subway system will become even harder in a third term that will unfold in the cornfields of Iowa if Cuomo turns his attention to a much talked about 2020 presidential run.